–Schedule note: The moment this blog-item posts my vacation starts and all will go mostly quiet on this site for 9 or 10 days. With NBA free-agent talks starting at 9 p.m. Saturday night, this is not the ideal timing, but…

A) No deals involving new contracts can be official until July 11; B) I don’t expect the Warriors to be incredibly busy through the negotiating period (but you never know); and…

C) It’s a Bay Area reality that sports columnists probably should take most of our down time before the start of NFL training camps (and these days, also before the baseball postseason), for good reason.

Back July 9. Until then, some quick thoughts re-capping the Warriors draft and looking to what might happen in free-agency…

First full week of baseball, with a banner to be unfurled in a ballpark nearby.

The Masters. The college basketball championship games (men and women). The Basketball Hall of Fame announcement. The Bonds verdict, possibly.

Some incredibly meaningful Warriors games. Err, maybe not.

Anyway, this is just a wonderful week for me to go on furlough. That’s my fault.

I’m the one who picked this week for many non-sports reasons. Though some of the conditions have changed significantly (think: epic natural disaster and sadly but inevitably canceled trip), I’m still on furlough this week off and still will be far, far away from the Bay Area for 7 more days.

If you know the history of this blog, you know that, even beyond the busy schedule, my absence all but guarantees that many kinds of mayhem are about to hit.

So it goes.

I will be back April 11. To the many commenters who pointedly dislike this blog, I apologize in advance, but I will be back.

–There were semi-plans to craft out my own full-fledged 2011 previews for the A’s and Giants, and then reality interceded.

Why not just leave the official previewing to the pros?

-Here’s Andy Baggarly’s story examining the start of the Giants’ World Series title defense. And don’t Giants fans just love those words: “World Series title defense.”

As a kid who grew up as a passionate Giants fan in the bleak Jack Clark/Rob Andrews/must-guzzle-hot-chocolate-at-night-games Candlestick era, it’s remarkable how how much those words mean, even though (you might have noticed) I stopped cheering for the Giants long, long ago.

I wrote for a few years that the Giants had no realistic playoff hope as long as they were a bottom-rung offensive team, and even proposed a ridiculous trade or two to remedy this situation.

Last year, they didn’t exactly light up the scoreboard (697 runs, 52 fewer than the average NL playoff team), but from mid-May on, when Buster Posey arrived and Pat Burrell started getting hot, they turned into a top-tier offensive team.

And the pitching made every run count–add the extra offense to the Giants’ giving up the second-fewest runs in baseball, and they had a +114 run-differential, right at the average for NL playoff teams.

* Sorry, this was supposed to be up earlier, but I’ve been mesmerized by Ratto’s visage on my TV screen — he’s sitting in for Radnich Radio, and also the Comcast simulcast, and I have the sound down while his sweatjacket & gesturing light up the Nielsen ratings…

-Nothing spectacularly surprising about this, but after speaking with two NFL sources this morning, I can reiterate that it sounds like Jed York has circled Jon Gruden and Jim Harbaugh as his main head-coaching candidates.

Makes sense. It’s not wrong. Gruden and Harbaugh have to be the top candidates for the 49ers’ job and, I believe, under the right circumstances, both would be quite interested.

Wouldn’t shock me at all if there already have been informal discussions with the representatives of both men, maybe even a light conversation between Jed and both primaries.

But York also is going to hire the GM first, and promises that the GM will make the call on the HC, but if he’s doing this right, he knows which GM candidates are most likely to bring in a top guy like Gruden or Harbaugh.

This doesn’t mean the 49ers are a lock to hire a GM with ties to Gruden or Harbaugh, and even if they do, those two have many career options and have been known to pull a tease or two.

Just ask the University of Miami with Gruden. And we’ll see what happens with Harbaugh and Michigan in the next week or so.

It’s also possible — knowing the Yorks — that a non-Gruden/Harbaugh GM-candidate blows the doors off his interview with Jed, and convinces him that the 49ers can go with a different (and cheaper!) kind of coach.

So… Merry Christmas to one and all, and especially to anybody who checks in on this blog randomly. It’s appreciated, even those who tell me how stupid I am.

Sorry for re-purposing an old column, but don’t think many will mind, and it’s Christmas (and I’m flying to St. Louis today–Christmas dinner in STL with most of the 49ers scribes and team PR traveling party!)

In my recent annual performance-review, my boss pointed out that the following column was one of his favorites of my 2010 work product. It wasn’t the writer, believe me. It was the moment that was No. 1.

The only thing I’m proud of is that I came close to capturing the AT&T Park rapture… and that I did it in the 90 minutes or so I had to go into the clubhouse, talk to a few players, get back to my computer, write and file the thing.

I have good memories of that game, and I’m sure most Bay Area sports fans do, too. I don’t like to use the word “transcendant,” but in that playoff run, in retrospect, the climax of Game 2 was the time and place.

And the most powerful thing about it was that everybody who was there knew it–this was transcendant. This encapsulated and amplified everything that happened and would soon happen with the Giants and the World Series and 52 years.

I was sequestered in the auxiliary press section beneath the third-base stands for most of Game 2, but decided to pop up to the pressbox to get a live look at and feel for the 8th and 9th ininings.

My smartest/luckiest decision of 2010, right there. I had no idea what was about to happen, and that made it all even better to experience.